The European Center for Linguistics (EZS), a co-operation between the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and the Institute for German Language in Mannheim (IDS), is advertising 45 places for participants at the Winter School “Linguistic approaches to conflicts in European language areas. Corpus - pragmatics – controversial”. The Winter School, which is kindly supported by Volkswagen Foundation, is taking place at the German Department of the University of Heidelberg from the 18 to 23 March 2013. The participants will be dealing with the general topic of 'conflict linguistics' in workshops and presentations by renowned referents like Guus Extra, Johannes Schwitalla, Hans Goebl and Arnulf Deppermann amongst others.

Conflicts and their resolution are inherent in our daily life and our increasingly interconnected existence. From the day-to-day controversies to the intricate processes of the European Union, we struggle to resolve our differences. Language is intimately involved in all conflicts and their resolutions. Most conflicts arise and are communicated via language. Likewise, language is the medium par excellence to arrive at their most elegant solutions. Thus, we valiantly strive 'to find the right word' or 'to use the correct language'. Indeed, we observe that, 'it´s not just what is said, but how it is communicated'. Our facility in utilizing language to penetrate social-cultural barriers reflects our progress as a species, and underlies any legitimate claim a society has to true knowledge and power. To understand and to resolve our conflicts, we need to know and to promulgate the rules and routines of linguistic communication. As linguists, we have much to contribute to the analysis and resolution of modern day conflicts on both 'basic' and 'applied' levels. With our social-symbolic models, we have the tools that can describe the communicative assumptions that are at the core of a controversy, and then to guide further analyses. Thereafter, our strategies to resolve current differences and to avoid future ones flow directly from our linguistic models.